On the 16th of March, we passed close to the strongly-fortified city of Nanci, the crooked and narrow, quaint and dark streets of which stand in the centre of a beautiful plain; and we Scots thought it worth a month's pay to see old Ramsay's regiment, five thousand strong, marching through its thoroughfares in column, with all their drums and fifes making them echo to the 'East Neuk o' Fife,' the liveliest of all our quick-steps. We had now marched two hundred and thirty miles from Paris. The French out-picquet, on the road to our front, alarmed the whole army one night, by firing at a mysterious object which hovered before them in the dark. A party of M. de Brissac's dragoons were ordered out to patrol; but as they always required a long time to grease and blacken their boots and mustachios, Dundrennan, Home, Livingstone, and I galloped forward to ascertain the cause of alarm; and discovered an old cow, riddled with bullets, lying on the roadway. By this time the whole army were under arms, thinking the Imperialists were upon us; and there was no small amount of laughter and grumbling at those young soldiers--_vieilles mustaches_--who caused such a disturbance. The cow we gave to our fourrier-major, and her collops were all simmering in the camp-kettles, long before our trumpets blew _à cheval_ again. As it neither suited our service, nor the policy of the time, to be absent from church, we were marched to the great cathedral, where we saw mass celebrated with great pomp and ceremony. Many of our reformed Scots shrugged their shoulders, and knitted their brows; but the Marquis de Gordon, who came of a Catholic house, whispered to me,-- 'Is it not a sad thing, M. Blane--sad to me, at least--to see a hundred gentlemen of the Scottish Guard mere idle spectators here--strangers before that altar, for which so many of their fathers bent the knee in peace, and laid down their lives in war?' 'My mother's house were Lollards of Kyle,' said I. Vic, with its old ruined castle of the twelfth century; the marshy plain of Marsal; the little town of Dieuse, and the sedgy banks of the Sielle, were all rapidly passed, without a shot being exchanged; and now we approached the land of strong castles and barrier-towns, as we entered Alsace, a German circle of the Upper Rhine, which was not ceded to France until 1648, prior to which year it belonged to the house of Swabia, who were styled Dukes of Alsace. Here, at a village in which we were quartered, I first tasted that vintage, peculiar to the province, named the stroh, or straw wine; and here we found, that which proved much less pleasant, the bravest of Duke Charles's troops, combined with some of the chosen and hardy lanzknechts of the Empire, garrisoning all the fortresses that lay between us and the far-famed Rhine.